So, what's with me and this whole only updating my blog every four months thing? Since my last blog entry, Richard Bach, the brilliant author whom I once accused of being terrible at the Internet, has updated his blog several times! I've got to get my act together.
So, here's what's up with me. I'm currently sitting in the dining hall of Parkland Hospital, waiting for my mom to get through with her physical therapy session, and I have a lot of work to get finished, but I'm procrastinating by updating my blog, which brings me to the heart of the matter: I am having a personal energy crisis.
I recently (yesterday) came to the profound conclusion that there simply isn't enough room for me in my life. I have a myriad of plans and ideas, but only so much energy. Lately, it seems I can't get my limited energy to be there when I want it to be, only when I need it to be. It takes a lot of energy to sit in traffic going to and from the hospital with Mom, then sitting around, waiting on the doctors. By the time I get home, I'm over. And for the next twelve to fifteen weeks, we're going to be at the hospital at least three days a week for this physical therapy program she is in to strengthen her heart. It is important to me to get Mom where she needs to go, but, as I said, I only have so much energy.
I put a team together last year to help with the publishing workload, and that has, so far, been equal parts miraculous and disastrous. Cleaning up after the disastrous bit is also taking a lot of time and energy, and I'm nowhere near having the mess I was left with corrected.
I do have an amazing creative director working at Clark Ink, though, and this has lightened my workload in the art and design departments tremendously!
As for the actual writing, that's what I need to get going on. I was terribly sick for several weeks, which put me behind, but over the last few days, I have managed to get several hundred words in, which is less than I normally do in a day.
I'm committed to reaching all of my goals for the year as a writer. I just need to figure out how to manage my energy better in order to get it done. What the team and I have planned for 2015 are twelve episodes of The Legends of Nod, two hardback books, which are The Demons of the Blood: A Metrognomes Adventure and the second novel in the Shadow of the Werewolf series, and two short stories "And then an Elephant Shot Out of His Chest" and the new ghost story "Mommy Doesn't See Me."
I finished the new Metrognomes book and the two short stories last year, and I am still hard at work on the new Nod stories and the new werewolf novel.
Most of Clark Ink's time and energy right now is going into The Legends of Nod. We're going to use the series to basically field test our business model. And what I've discovered about working with this particular, apparently very action-oriented group of characters, is that writing each episode of The Legends of Nod takes a tremendous amount of energy! Novels don't take as much energy as a single short adventure in the world of Nod. It's insane! But I love this world and all of it's colorful heroes and villains. It's just really, really exhausting writing nine adventures in a row as I'm determined to do over the next couple of months. Some episodes may be a little more low key, but the characters seem to want to push me as far as they can, and they always have better ideas about my outlines once we get going. There have been several days, lately, when even thinking about what's coming up in the next scene takes so much of my energy that I have nothing left to deliver with on the page.
I have a set writing goal for each day. I just need to find a way to actually have the energy when I sit down to write. So, writing The Legends of Nod, writing Shadow of the Werewolf II, editing, formatting, going to the doctor with Mom for hours and hours out of the day, maintaining what little social life I have left, doing odd jobs here and there to make ends meet... it's an energy budgeting nightmare. Not to mention, my body has no idea when it's supposed to be sleeping, or when it's supposed to be awake, after being sick so long, pulling all-nighters writing here and there, getting up hours before the sun to accommodate some of Mom's medical appointments. My circadian rhythm is all kinds of jacked up.
So, my goal for the week is to figure this stuff out. I have got to find time, with energy, to write and stay on schedule. I may have to deliberately choose to be a worthless zombie in some other areas of my life, but I have to get this sorted. I've been getting further behind schedule daily since just before Christmas.
So, that's my promise, to you my readers. I will sort this out and get my act together! We have a tremendous year ahead if I do!
